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McConnell Defends Iran NIE Against the Right
Faced with the inconvenient assessment that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program, GOP Senators are running an old game plan: create a commission that will treat the truth and a lie as equal possibilities. However, Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, is unequivocally standing by the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.
The Washington Post reports that GOP Senators John Ensign (R-NV) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) want to create a commission on the NIE that will, inevitably, trash it. For some historical perspective on how frequently the right has gone after intelligence assessments that conflict with desired conservative policy preferences, read Ilan Goldenberg. His bottom line: "In all of these cases conservatives played with and disregarded intelligence to help make their cases for a particular policy. And in all of these cases the conservatives were wrong." But he might have added something else: in all of these cases the conservatives were successful, despite being, you know, wrong.
Meanwhile, others on the right see something more nefarious at work. Danielle Pletka of AEI smears the entire intelligence community to the Post without any evidence: "This NIE was presented with a clear intention to deceive..." Similarly, in The New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi doesn't bother addressing the new intelligence that prompted the Iran volte-face, and simply says the U.S. has lost "the will to stop Tehran" from doing something that Tehran isn't doing.
The intelligence community isn't backing down in the face of the right-wing pressure. "We certainly stand by the product," says DNI spokeswoman Vanee Vines. "It represents the consensus of intelligence community. That was clear when we released it. … We stand by it as comprehensive and accurate." But don't expect the braying from the right about appeasement and betrayal to cease.
Comments (10)
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JohnJ wrote on December 7, 2007 1:26 PM:Gee, I thought that Chimpy had fixed the Intelligence community.
Supdog wrote on December 7, 2007 1:51 PM:This is the result of Bush/Cheney playing with intel (courtesy Doug Feith and the Office of Spin) and trying to turn the intelligence community into the Republican Kremlin. Looks like the director has had all he can stands (and won't stands for no more)
And the beat goes on wrote on December 7, 2007 2:04 PM:On Dec. 4 I posted that the shrubs rhetoric changed subtly in the past several months from how Iran wanted to “build” nuclear weapons to how Iran wanted to acquire the “knowledge” of nuclear weapons. I don’t think that I looked deep enough. Think about this: do you mean to tell me that we did not know this program was halted for four years? Do you really believe that we just found this out recently? Talk about an intelligence breakdown. Yes, these corrupt and manipulative s.o.b.s knew the truth but they HAD to have known this before August 2007.
Here goes my conspiracy theory. Iran halted their program in 2003. Valerie Plame Wilson is outed in 2003. Who had the most to gain from this outing? What was she working on?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-clemons/cheney-teams-plame-leak-_b_15579.html
Talk about convenient. They can kill two birds with one stone by sending Joe Wilson to Iraq for the WMD story and shut down one of the groups trying to discover if Iran is building nuclear weapons with one blow.
Yes, we need to know what they knew and when they knew it but we need to look way before August 2007 if we want the real answers. So go ahead – investigate the NIE. Remember to ask them why didn’t this become knowledge for FOUR YEARS.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2007/12/the-senate-and.html
The truth is out there…
JohnW1141 wrote on December 7, 2007 2:14 PM:And the beat goes on asks;
"Here goes my conspiracy theory. Iran halted their program in 2003. Valerie Plame Wilson is outed in 2003. Who had the most to gain from this outing? What was she working on?"
I wodner if Plame knew about Iran in 2003 and if this is an item she's forbidden to speak of by the CIA.
Miles Webster wrote on December 7, 2007 2:14 PM:What is with these scam posts? This is the 2nd one I have seen so far today.
- Miles
Mike wrote on December 8, 2007 9:28 AM:Plame was outed in 2003. How many intel people were PO about this happening to her? It could be them next, so it may have taken 4 years for payback.
I wouldn't be surprised that some other things might come out about intel matters. Time will tell. But we the taxpayers will never know the full story.
65yoh wrote on December 8, 2007 9:54 PM:imo, the fundamental lie being meme'd by the iran nie is that iran 'had a weapons program'.
peas!
Anonymous wrote on December 9, 2007 6:09 PM:The NIE on Iran says there's been no nuclear program since 2003. It is a war crime to attack targets not related to a military threat, not an imminent threat, or which violates the Geneva conventions.
Time to get more information about what the DoD planners were targeting. It doesn't look like he's been targeting anything that Geneva permits.
A. What has the President been targeting in Iran since 2003?
B. How long has COngress known about this illegal targeting?